In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  I said, "Well, then, since I'm the ringleader, I'll sign first. Who wants to be second?"

  And they were still reluctant. So I said, "Then let's sign in alphabetical order. That still leaves me first and we can all say that the order of our names is merely alphabetical and has no other significance." And then they signed.

  We then mailed off the letter and it was as though it had been dropped off into space. Nothing seemed to come of it.

  7

  On April 8, the specialists entered the barracks suddenly, with news for me. They had signed up for officers' training school. I had

  been wondering where they were all day, and now I was both astonished and upset.

  I told them that they were crazy; that they would be compelled to sign up for two years if they did that, whereas, as privates, they could strive continually for discharge.

  Nonsense, they said, no one was getting discharged, and if they had to stay in the Army, they might as well be officers and comfortable. Besides, once they signed up they would get an instant furlough. If I signed up, I could get back at once to see Gertrude.

  I held off, growing angrier by the minute, calling them traitors and renegades who had turned their back on the letter we had all sent off. I refused, despite all their blandishments, to join them. Even though it meant remaining behind in Operation Crossroads all alone, even though it meant missing the chance for quick reunion with Gertrude, I wouldn't sign up for officer training and wouldn't give up my drive for discharge.

  And when I made it clear that nothing they could say would alter my opinion, they broke down and admitted it was a practical joke. They were going to pay me back for not pulling KP by luring me into attempting to sign up for officer training and making a fool of myself.

  It took them quite a while to smooth my ruffled feathers, but I was secretly enormously pleased with myself. I had held to my principles!

  8

  On April 4, I had received an unusual piece of mail—a package that turned out to be a complimentary copy of The Best of Science Fiction, with "Blind Alley" included in it. Once again, a small memory of older, happier days assailed me.

  The pressures to which it gave rise built up within me. On April 10, I dug out the first draft of "Evidence," which I still had, but which I had done nothing with for nearly two months. Since I was a clerk-typist with nothing, at the moment, to type, I put the entire eight thousand words into final copy on that day.

  The next day I went to the post office in Honolulu and mailed it off to Campbell—airmail, registered, return receipt requested—for $1.70. I asked him, if he took the story, to send the check to Gertrude.

  He did take it and he did send the check to Gertrude. The check arrived on April 20 and I got word of it from her on April 29. What's more, the story was paid for at the new high rate of a full $.02 a word, so that the check came to $160.

  9

  On April 15, I attended a Passover Seder given at McKinley High School in Honolulu. There was a $2.00 charge for civilians, but it was free to servicemen. It was the first Seder I had attended since my father's, eighteen years before.

  I enjoyed it tremendously. Heroically and steadily, I plowed through the endless supply of good things to eat. In addition, there was sweet port wine at each table into which all could dip, ad lib—and since that is by all odds my favorite form of liquor (when I can bring myself to drink any at all), I ad libbed quite a bit.

  I was as high as a kite in no time, and by the time I made my way home, I sloshed as I moved.

  I walked into the barracks compound singing Passover songs quite loudly and made considerable noise as I got into the barracks itself. Several of the boys, particularly Dylewski, woke up at once and demanded to know who it was. I was the only one absent and I didn't drink, so the obviously drunken swine who was staggering from one bed to the other couldn't be me.

  "It's me," I called out happily. "Is that you, Stash?" (That was the diminutive of his first name, in Polish.)

  "Asimov?" he said, wondering.

  "Stash," I said, spreading my arms wide, "I love you."

  Whereupon he jumped up tensely, threw himself into a posture of self-defense, and said, "You try to hug me and I knock you down."

  I was helped into my cot and someone pulled some of my clothes off me and I lay giggling there all night. It was the only day in the Army in which I was truly happy. I guess that's why people drink. 6

  I had no reason to be proud of this experience of drunkenness. The others easily outstripped me. On April 27, the other specialists all got drunk for some reason or other. Upton, who had the bed next to mine, lay there hiccuping and slowly and repetitively protesting his love for me.

  "Yes, Ed," I kept saying, soothingly, and then I recited for him, dramatically:

  The love of a man for his brother And the love of a child for its mother Are nothing at all compared to the love Of one drunken bum for another.

  6 1 balanced the Passover celebration by spending Easter Sunday, the twenty-6rst, at a Lutheran Church with a couple of Protestant soldiers. I sang the hymns lustily.

  Upton listened carefully and nodded and said, "That's right. That's right." Then he leaned over the side of the bed (the far side, thank goodness) threw up, and went to sleep.

  10

  On April 30, we left our barracks, in which I had stayed forty-six days, and moved onto the Cortland, a ship in the harbor. It would take us to Bikini.

  I was sorry to leave the barracks, for I had spent a quite tolerable time there despite my separation from Gertrude. I was also sorry to leave the other specialists (after two months of close association), for they were distributed among other ships.

  On that day, too, I completed my first half year in the Army and I was rather astonished I had survived it as well as I had. I hadn't even gotten into trouble with any of the officers except—nearly—once.

  I was walking down the street near the barracks one morning, with my cap shoved back on my head, my hands in my pockets, whistling cheerfully—quite as though I were a teen-ager back in Brooklyn—and I passed a colonel.

  The trouble was that I passed him without seeing him, as I used to pass the candy store's customers once.

  "Soldier!" came the call.

  I stiffened, stopped whistling, withdrew my hands from my pockets, adjusted my cap, and stepped up briskly. "Sir?" I said, saluting.

  He returned the salute, "Do you know who I am?"

  "I don't know your name, sir, but you're a colonel in the United States Army."

  "Did you salute me when you passed me just now?"

  "No, sir."

  "Why not?"

  "I was thinking of something, sir, and I didn't see you. I'm sorry, sir."

  He asked me if I knew the reason for military courtesy and I was able to give him a reasoned exposition. He asked me to whom I was assigned and I told him. He asked me what I was doing, and I explained my position as critically needed specialist on Operation Crossroads.

  "And your qualifications for that job?"

  "Two degrees in chemistry from Columbia University, sir."

  Up to that point, I was sure I was going to be reported and disciplined, but now he sighed. I guess the thought of a private with two degrees in chemistry broke his heart. He said, "I've been in the Army for thirty years, and I'll just never get used to these new ways."

  He left me in discouragement and I waited till he was out of sight, then went my way.

  11

  Life on the ship was rather easygoing. I wangled myself a job as a typist and once again didn't pull duty. I spent most of my time reading and eating (the sailors fed themselves well) and watching movies. The high point, as I recall, came when I managed to liberate an entire frosted layer cake out of the kitchen, then sat in a secluded corner of the deck watching a movie while I ate the entire thing very slowly.

  Then, on May 13, 1946, when I had been on the Cortland for two weeks, something very unexpected happened. I received a letter from Gertrude
, telling me that her allotment had not arrived and that when she called to inquire, they told her that the allotment had been stopped because her husband (me!) had been discharged.

  The allotment was $50 a month, and I didn't want it stopped. Worse, what if my application for discharge back in February had been approved and I had never been informed?

  The next day I got off the ship, despite the protests of the officer in charge of us. (A stopped allotment is a serious thing, and I was able to outindignation him.) I then went from officer to officer, at each stop demanding that either Gertrude get her allotment if I were still in the Army, or that I be sent back home if I were not. I also hinted that I was in a peculiar position since my wife must believe that I was out of the Army and that nonappearance at home might be very suspicious from the marital standpoint.

  I finally worked my way up to Colonel Jordan, who was in charge of all Army operations. He was a rather stout man, who impressed me as a rather good-natured, long suffering fellow.

  He listened to the story, and said, "But how can you possibly have been discharged?"

  "I don't know, sir, but that's what my wife was told. Here's her letter/'

  "You never applied for discharge, did you?"

  "Yes, I did, sir. On February 11, I applied for a research discharge under Order 363."

  He spread his arms. "Well, it's probably some mixup but it's against Crossroads policy to send anyone to Bikini who may be subject to discharge. I may have to take you off the project."

  I returned to the ship and must have set a world record for holding my breath, for the Cortland was due to leave for Bikini three days later, on May 17.

  The next day I went to see Colonel Jordan again, and it was official. I was taken off Operation Crossroads and was not to go to Bikini. I was, instead, to be sent back to Camp Lee.

  I was delighted.

  On the morning of May 16 (Gertrude's birthday), I was off the Cortland after a fifteen-day stay aboard, and I was officially off Operation Crossroads, too, after seventy-five days on it. I had accomplished it with just one day to spare. 7

  On May 17, the Cortland sailed, as did the other ships. The other six specialists were off to sea on the way to Bikini, and I remained behind on Oahu. In a way, I had betrayed them, but it was through no voluntary act of my own; it was the Army's act of stopping Gertrude's allotment that had brought it about. In my place, each one of them would have done what I did.

  12

  On the nineteenth, my orders came through, and I was sent back to the United States "by the first available water transportation." That meant six days at sea, but that was good enough. An airplane would have been much faster, but I decided I didn't want an airplane.

  It was not until May 27, after I had been off the Cortland for seven days (and by now the specialists must be at Bikini), that I was finally moved. To my surprise, I was taken to an airport and told to get on a plane.

  I tried to protest, pointing to my orders, but a sergeant said, "Private, don't give me a hard time. Get on that plane!" So I did. It's a lot harder to argue with sergeants than with colonels.

  A little after midnight the plane took off, and Honolulu disappeared in the distance. I had been in Oahu for seventy-four days—2V2 months.

  It was not much of a plane. It was a large propeller-driven transport with its insides eviscerated so that it could carry as many men as possible. I tried to sleep stretched out on the floor, but that didn't work very well. When dawn came, we found ourselves flying over clouds equipped with little blue triangles here and there. It finally dawned on me that these were spaces between the clouds and I was seeing the Pacific Ocean.

  7 It may have been a lucky day indeed. Decades later it turned out that leukemia was substantially more common among people who had at one time observed atomic-bomb tests than among those who hadn't.

  Discharge

  At 5:00 p.m. local time on May 28, 1946, the plane touched down near San Francisco and I was back on continental United States soil after eighty days. That evening I called my father and heard his voice for the first time in nearly three months. I had failed in my attempt to get Gertrude, so I asked him to pass on the news of my return.

  To my astonishment, he seemed displeased at my return. He wanted to know why I had been sent back.

  I said, "The Army stopped Gertrude's allotment because they said I was discharged. They sent me back to look into the matter."

  My father said, "It will look funny for the customers. They might think there was something wrong."

  And I said, with more than a touch of impatience, "The hell with the customers. I'm not going to stay five thousand miles away from home just because they might think it's funny. If you think more of them than you do me, that's your problem."

  I was furious with my father, but eventually I found out what was bothering him. A postwar letter from his brother Boris had informed him that his brother Samuel was an officer in the Red Army—possibly a major or a major general (it was difficult to figure out the meaning of the Russian word).

  My father had passed on the news to me and I had mentioned it to my friends in Hawaii as an item of humor. My father thought that this might have activated Army suspicions of me. 1

  On May 30, 1946, I took the train East. I had an upper berth to myself this time. The next day I was back in Ogden, Utah, where I didn't bother to buy a postcard, or even get off the train. I was alone on this journey and I didn't trust my sense of direction. On June 1, in fact, when we stopped in Omaha, I recorded in my diary,

  1 1 never heard any news of my Uncle Samuel again. I presume he's no longer alive, and I certainly have no intention of trying to obtain any information concerning him from Soviet authorities.

  "I got off at Omaha to get a paper and a bar of chocolate and nearly didn't find my way back (which is the reason I don't get off usu-ally)."

  On June 2, the train arrived in Chicago, and there was a four-hour layover, during which I had to switch to another train. At the other station I called Gertrude and heard her voice for the first time in eighty-seven days. She still had not received her allotment—just a form letter saying it was being looked into.

  The train from Chicago was a coach and I slept sitting up with the help of a pillow rented for fifteen cents. Later on the afternoon of Monday, June 3, I found myself at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. That, for some reason, was where my orders sent me.

  It was my intention to get new orders cut to send me to Camp Lee, where I could find out about the discharge matter, but it turned out that I had a fifteen-day furlough time coming to me, plus three-day travel time. I decided to take that and postpone the fight for a while.

  By 5:00 p.m. on June 4, I was on the train for New York, and by 10:30 a.m. on June 5, I was at Windsor Place, and at 1:00 p.m. Gertrude was there. It was exactly 101 days since I had last seen her. I worked it out to the hour in my diary—2,418 hours.

  It might have been better. She was working on evening duty at the Henry Paper Box Company and I had to go there and sit while she did her work, which was not the romantic reunion I had been longing for during my over three months of exile. I recorded in my diary, however:

  "In the night, I finally slept with her again. . . . It's too bad about the fellows at Bikini."

  3

  On Tuesday, June 11, I seized the opportunity to see Campbell for the first time in half a year, and took my father with me. It was the first time my father had ever met Campbell. Ted Sturgeon was there and we greeted each other gladly.

  My father went off, then—he had to get back to the candy store— and Campbell and I lunched together. I had an idea for another posi-tronic robot story to be called "Little Lost Robot," and I advanced it. I didn't think I would have a chance to write it until the discharge question was settled one way or the other, but I didn't like to see Campbell without advancing any ideas.

  After that I went up to Columbia and saw Dawson for the first time in almost a year. I told him I was doing my best to get out
of the Army and back into Columbia, and he was most enthusiastic (or, in his

  kindhearted way, he pretended to be). My next step was to register for a housing project that Columbia was planning to sponsor in Nyack. (After all, I would have to live somewhere.)

  Gertrude and I went for two trips along the boardwalk to Coney Island—alone on June 13, and along with Roy Machlowitz and a friend of his on the fifteenth. Roy visited New York regularly and, almost as regularly, visited Gertrude or called her—which was good, because I could rely on him for news about her.

  Roy sometimes expressed apologetic embarrassment at escaping the draft. He had a history of rheumatic fever from which he had recovered completely in everyone's eyes but those of the draft board. I brushed it off and finally put an end to his apologies by saying rather sharply that if his induction meant my discharge then I would push for his induction—but that since I stayed in the Army whether he was in or out, he might as well stay out.

  On June 21, my furlough was in its last day and I got back on the train for Camp Lee—and on that same day, Gertrude got a letter reinstating her allotment. The whole thing had been a clerical error, and I was not out of the Army.

  Actually, I didn't think I was, and I didn't complain. The error got me two weeks in New York with Gertrude and reassignment to Camp Lee, where I could push for discharge. Without the error, I would have been on Bikini with the other specialists for three weeks now and with considerable additional time to go.

  I felt too relieved that this had not happened to feel properly guilty.

  4

  On June 22, 1946, I was back in Camp Lee, exactly sixteen weeks after I had left it. The next day I went to Petersburg to look up Gladys Credo. She was Robert Credo's wife; she was the one who knew the senator. She had gotten work at Petersburg to be with Bob while he was at Camp Lee and she had kept her job there while he was gone. I felt it was my duty to report to her on events (and to get her to tell me I hadn't done the wrong thing to get out of it when circumstances allowed me to).